"Put that book away," she said. She hated the two brown volumes of Elwes's Spinoza you had bought for your birthday. "The dinner will be ruined if you read."
"It'll be ruined if I don't read."
For then your mind raged over the saucepans and the fragrant, floury pasteboard, hungry and unfed. It couldn't bring anything about. It snatched at the minutes left over from Roddy and the house and Mamma and the piano. You knew what every day would be like. You would get up early to practise. When the cooking and the housework was done Roddy would want you. You would play tennis together with Mr. Sutcliffe and Dorsy Heron. Or you would go up on to the moors and comfort Roddy while he talked about the "things" he had done in Canada and about getting away and about the dog. You would say over and over again, "You know you didn't hang him. It was Jem's uncle. He was a bad dog. He bit the sheep." In the winter evenings you would sew or play or read aloud to Mamma and Roddy, and Roddy would crouch over the fender, with his hands stretched out to the fire, not listening.
But Roddy was better. The wind whipped red blood into his cheeks. He said he would be well if it wasn't for the bleating of the sheep, and the crying of the peewits and the shouting of the damned villagers. And people staring at him. He would be well if he could get away.
Then—he would be well if he could marry Dorsy.
So the first year passed. And the second. And the third year. She was five and twenty. She thought: "I shall die before I'm fifty. I've lived half my life and done nothing."
IX.
Old Dr. Kendal was dead. He had had nothing more to live for. He had beaten Mr. Peacock of Sarrack. Miss Kendal was wearing black ribbons in her cap instead of pink. And Maggie's sister was dead of her cancer.
The wall at the bottom of the garden had fallen down and Roddy had built it up again.
He had heaved up the big stones and packed them in mortar; he had laid them true by the plumb-line; Blenkiron's brother, the stonemason, couldn't have built a better wall.